Belgian-born photographer Quentin de Briey lives between Barcelona and Paris, where the enigmatic but notably different creative energies of the two cities blur together to form his aesthetic. A career as a professional skateboarder took a turn for the worst when injury struck and he had to give it up – instead, taking up a job as a photographer’s assistant, paving the way for his next endeavour. Everything happens for a reason and this is point and case; the opportunity to pursue photography full-time is what gifted us with the candid images of the life we wish we were leading.
Tumblr is a playground for aesthetically pleasing scrolls of images but The Other Day, Quentin’s account –and suitably the name of his new book– is pressingly different. The images are all his own and they’re honest, unvarnished, intimate, off-the-cuff, gritty, playful; a heightened level of relatability is something that resonates, despite the fact that not everyone’s life is as photographic as this.
The big guns too are dying to hone in on his ocular vision – he’s shot lookbooks for Zara and Mango as well as editorials for several Vogue editions across the world, Porter Magazine and Le Monde. As De Briey releases a new book at Yvon Lambert –a collaged visual diary of images spanning across his life– he speaks to Metal about the spontaneity of his images, the endurance of books and provoking emotion with his work.
The big guns too are dying to hone in on his ocular vision – he’s shot lookbooks for Zara and Mango as well as editorials for several Vogue editions across the world, Porter Magazine and Le Monde. As De Briey releases a new book at Yvon Lambert –a collaged visual diary of images spanning across his life– he speaks to Metal about the spontaneity of his images, the endurance of books and provoking emotion with his work.
Why did you title the book The Other Day?
It’s the name of my Tumblr, where I started to post my diary pictures regularly a few years ago. I still take pictures almost everyday and this book is about that – my diary pictures.
How did you find the curation process and selecting which images would make it into the book?
I was looking for spontaneous pictures mostly, in the end I was adding any pictures of random moments I wanted to remember.
Is this something you’ve wanted to do for a while?
It’s my third book actually, but it’s the first one including collages – there were just too many pictures to put in it, so that’s how it ended up like that.
Books have, and still manage to endure the age of Instagram and instantaneous imagery, why do you think that is?
You don’t always want to look at a digital screen, of course. You look at prints differently too, many times I look at a picture I’ve seen a hundred times on my computer and after I print it new details appear and you see the picture differently.
If you could pick one emotion that you want readers to feel after looking through your book, what would it be?
Any emotion actually, if it provokes any emotions while reading it, that’s already great!
